Just over 10 years ago, we rented the cottage of a friend of mine on Little Bob Lake in Minden, Ontario. Back then, I sported a Nikon D70 and shot in jpeg more often than RAW (shudder). Well, I recently re-discovered those photos in my Lightroom catalog and they brought back some fond memories of that vacation. But my critical eye realized that I'd done very little in the processing of these files, and I thought I breathe new life into them by going at them again. In some cases, these new versions are more stylized than my usual image processing, but when one looks back through the filter of memory, our minds tend to do that to us, don't you think? Coloring the world of the past with the experiences of today.
At any rate, I hope you enjoy this series and for as much as I prefer shooting RAW these days, I hope to show through these images that a lot can still be done with a jpeg file.
Note: for a few shots, I've included the starting images. Back then, my processing was entirely in Photoshop, so these images were likely already processed to some degree.
A great many of these photos translated so well to black and white.
After and Before. The first set of comparisons, looking through the rose-colored glasses of memory. In reality, the scene was likely somewhere between the two in terms of color.
I love the texture in this shot, something that color images just can't seem to do. It's not because the texture isn't there in a color version, but that layer of color, no matter how muted, tends to reduce the impact of texture.
I'm pretty phobic about spiders, and dock spiders - which seem to be monstrously large - can send me running for the hills (or at least the safety of solid ground). I bucked up though, and made this image. The stark contrast of the spider on the rock won over my fear.
Another After and Before set. In this case I know the sunset was richer than the original, but I managed to pull out a glassy sheen in the reworked image that I'm pretty pleased with.
This final image seemed to me at the time - and even now - so penultimately symbolic of cottage life.